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Show HN: PodText.ai – Search anything said on a podcast, highlight text to play

podtext.ai

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Show HN: PodText.ai – Search anything said on a podcast, highlight text to play

#1

Post by anonbuilder »

Hi HN, wanted to share a project that I’ve been working on recently.

PodText allows users to find anything said on a podcast. You can also listen and share clips to a specific part of the podcast audio, simply by highlighting the text of that part. Currently there are just over 25k podcast episodes and I’m adding a lot more in the coming weeks (yes my GPU bill is painful).

In order to monetize it, I’m building a sponsorship database to help sponsors find podcasts and vice versa. This will be sold in the form of a $99/month “PodText Business” subscription. I bet I could charge a lot more to large sponsors but I’ll tweak that as I talk to potential customers.

Right now the UI is very bare bones (doesn’t even have pagination) but I’ll polish it once the data pipeline is working well. Please let me know if you run into any bugs or have any questions about the site or business model.

PS: I'm a regular on HN using my real name but can't post under that account since my employer will fire me if they found out about this project :-)

Show HN: PodText.ai – Search anything said on a podcast, highlight text to play
podtext.ai

Re: Show HN: PodText.ai – Search anything said on a podcast, highlight text to play

#2

Post by lappa »

This is a really interesting project with a lot of potential.

If I were a sponsor looking for a podcast I would want my search process to look something like this:

- Search for a term relevant to my line of business

- See a list of podcasts ordered by % of utterances which contain my key phrase throughout their last N episodes

- Annotation of how many listeners each podcast had in last N episodes

Re: Show HN: PodText.ai – Search anything said on a podcast, highlight text to play

#4

Post by anonbuilder »

lappa wrote: post #2

This is a really interesting project with a lot of potential. If I were a sponsor looking for a podcast I would want my search process to look something like this: - Search for a term relevant to my line of business - See a list of podcasts ordered by % of utterances which contain my key phrase throughout their last N episodes - Annotation of how many listeners each podcast had in last N episodes

Appreciate the feedback! I'll keep these use cases in mind as I build out PodText Business

Re: Show HN: PodText.ai – Search anything said on a podcast, highlight text to play

#5

Post by anonbuilder »

mritchie712 wrote: post #3

This is amazing. How do you search for two terms at once? e.g. "aboriginal" and "origin". Doesn't seem possible to require both terms are present.

Thanks! The search function is built with Algolia, I'm sure they support boolean ops like "AND" but I'll need to dig into their API. I think if you search both terms, transcripts containing both should be ranked higher.

Re: Show HN: PodText.ai – Search anything said on a podcast, highlight text to play

#6

Post by kwerk »

anonbuilder wrote: post #5
mritchie712 wrote: post #3

This is amazing. How do you search for two terms at once? e.g. "aboriginal" and "origin". Doesn't seem possible to require both terms are present.

Thanks! The search function is built with Algolia, I'm sure they support boolean ops like "AND" but I'll need to dig into their API. I think if you search both terms, transcripts containing both should be ranked higher.

I’m doing a similar personal product. Highly recommend switching to Typesense before your Algolia trial is up. I’ve heard good things about Meilisearch but Typesense has been rock solid for me.

Re: Show HN: PodText.ai – Search anything said on a podcast, highlight text to play

#7

Post by anonbuilder »

kwerk wrote: post #6
anonbuilder wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! The search function is built with Algolia, I'm sure they support boolean ops like "AND" but I'll need to dig into their API. I think if you search both terms, transcripts containing both should be ranked higher.

I’m doing a similar personal product. Highly recommend switching to Typesense before your Algolia trial is up. I’ve heard good things about Meilisearch but Typesense has been rock solid for me.

Haven't heard about Typesense - thanks for the pointer! Btw if you want to trade notes on our projects, feel free to email me: team@podtext.ai

Re: Show HN: PodText.ai – Search anything said on a podcast, highlight text to play

#9

Post by pablomendes »

anonbuilder wrote: post #5
mritchie712 wrote: post #3

This is amazing. How do you search for two terms at once? e.g. "aboriginal" and "origin". Doesn't seem possible to require both terms are present.

Thanks! The search function is built with Algolia, I'm sure they support boolean ops like "AND" but I'll need to dig into their API. I think if you search both terms, transcripts containing both should be ranked higher.

You might want to try semantic search instead of fiddling with keywords. Disclaimer: I'm building a plug-and-play semantic search API at https://kailualabs.com
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